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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Gordon Ramsay does it again. The MasterChef brand spun off to Friday with MasterChef Junior and after finals ended up tying for an impressive win the 8/7c hour. CBS remained respectable with Undercover Boss, up a tick from last year's premiere, and the big losers in this suddenly crowded hour were ABC's comedies Last Man Standing and The Neighbors, combining to tumble by nearly 20% week-to-week.

ABC had much better news at 9/8c as Shark Tank picked up the two ticks despite the struggles in the previous hour. CBS was once again a very respectable second with the Friday debut of Hawaii Five-0, but probably the Eye's biggest pleasant surprise was its 10/9c domination with Blue Bloods, which outrated any result from last season. The procedurals will likely come down a bit after the promotion of Five-0's move dies down, but consider this a surprisingly stout start for CBS.

Broadcast TV continued a great opening week by going +10% vs. premiere Friday 2012, with only NBC down year-to-year (and they had Grimm last year). The big four are now tracking +3% vs. the first five days of 2012.

FULL TABLE:

Info

Show

Timeslot

True

A18-49

Skew

Last

LeLa

Rank

y2y

TLa

Ty2y

Last Man Standing

1.2

27%

-20%

-0.3

n/a

2/2

n/a

-20%

-14%

1.4

The Neighbors

1.0

31%

-17%

-0.2

-0.3

2/2

-69%

-17%

-38%

1.3

Shark Tank

2.0

37%

+11%

+0.2

-0.2

1/2

+33%

+14%

+90%

2.2

20/20

1.2

34%

-8%

-0.1

+0.2

2/2

-8%

-11%

-11%

1.2

ABC:

-3%

+10%

Undercover Boss

1.6

25%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

+7%

+45%

+23%

1.9

Hawaii Five-0

1.6

21%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

-11%

+167%

+45%

1.7

Blue Bloods

1.7

18%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

+13%

+162%

+13%

1.9

CBS:

+109%

+26%

The Michael J. Fox Show (R)

0.8

25%

+23%

+14%

1.0

Dateline Fri

1.3

25%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

+44%

+16%

-10%

1.5

NBC:

+17%

-6%

MasterChef Junior

1.6

47%

n/a

n/a

n/a

1/1

n/a

+129%

+39%

1.9

Sleepy Hollow (R)

0.9

42%

-14%

-14%

1.0

Fox:

+43%

+14%

Perfect Score

0.2

39%

+0%

+0.0

n/a

2/7

n/a

+0%

-60%

0.2

Perfect Score (R)

0.2

52%

+0%

-60%

0.3

America's Next Top Model

0.4

50%

+0%

+0.0

+0.0

5/9

-20%

+0%

+100%

0.4

CW:

+0%

-14%

Big5:

+31%

+10%

KEY (click to expand)

A18-49 - Adults 18-49 rating. Percentage of US TV-owning adults 18-49 watching the program.Skew - Percentage of adults 18-49 within the show's total viewership.Last - A18-49 difference (percent and numerical) from the show's previous episode.LeLa - A18-49 difference between the show's lead-in and its lead-in for the previous episode.Rank - The A18-49 rating's rank among the show's episodes so far this season.y2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the show's rating a year ago.TLa - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one week ago.Ty2y - Percent difference between A18-49 and the network's rating in the timeslot one year ago.True - A metric that adjusts the A18-49 rating for overall viewing levels, competition and lead-in. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION. For finals, see SpotVault.

13 comments:

Pending adjustments, H50 did the exact number I was expecting to. The episode was excellent, I hope it can hold up. I know the show had a disappointing third season but I still saw it as having way more long term potential than something like Elementary which is meh right out of the gate. I think CBS made a mistake sending it to Fridays this early, Sundays would at least have been a bit better. Blue Bloods did shockingly well, I wonder if those numbers will hold in finals, but either way it is very good. The ABC comedies did terribly. I think part of it might be the repeat of the michael j. fox show to be honest, it should appeal to the same audience that watches LMS, but fact stands that they were way too down for their own good. I now doubt that TN will see a third season. ABC made a mistake canceling Malibu Country only to replace it by The Neighbors and we all knew it.

Though Malibu Country would have been dragged down by a 1.2 LMS too, admittedly, at least it was proven compatible. Not that it matters what Shark Tank has for a lead-in - except for the fact that the more The Neighbors goes down, the better Shark Tank's True numbers look! ;)

As you predicted, the Friday Question is down to the nerve-shredding weekend adjustment delay. I don't think anyone would have predicted a 1.7 for Blue Bloods, though.

I agree with you. I think most of the flops were postponed and others had artificially better situations this week (the whole SVU situation which won't repeat itself, Nashville having a MF lead-in). Also, I doubt those 3% hold when the sunday comparisons arrive and ABC Sundays show its erosion.

I think the hours where there will be real improvements this season are:- The Voice Mondays vs the Voice Mondays- NBC Tuesdays as a whole (8pm will get weaker since its TBL vs The Voice but the rest of the night's gains will more than make up for that)- Parenthood vs Rock Center/Do No Harm/Hannibal- Dateline vs. Repeats/Fashion Star

I think that MC wouldn't have done that much better but there is a chance that it would have. I truly believe that in a comedy block the lead-out matters. So I think that LMS ratings could have been a tick higher had MC been there, which in turn would have helped MC a bit. All speculation, sure. All in all, the point is that it seems like a very pointless move. And we all called it, so why couldn't ABC? Same reason we all called Lucky 7 being a flop miles away. 95% of the times when we all call the same thing it's true and if it's so obvious for us, why isn't it obvious for the network spending the money? That's my point, you know? I know sometimes we are proven wrong greatly, but those are such a minority of times. Is it really worth chasing it? I don't understand what upside could TN have relative to MC, while I certainly see the potential for a wayyy bigger downside. That's my issue.

So do you think that The Blacklist's trajectory will basically be the same as Revolution's? I know it's too early to make a knowledgeable prediction, but I think Blacklist could hold up better in the long run and end up giving NBC a marginal gain in that slot by the end of the season.

(Now watch the show tank by November, just to show me that I know nothing.)

No, I actually think the show will hold up better and likely score a better A18-49 score. However:a) Revolution did premiere higher, so even if it had a worse trajectory, in absolute terms, it would still have an advantageb) People talk about Revolution as if it flopped more than it did. During the first half, it was exceptionally high and it even went up a couple of times from previous episodes. Even on the second half it didn't go nearly that low as people say.c) Year to year declines of ratings

I think the real difference between the two is that we will see the blacklist stabilize at a higher level, thus making the numbers way less frontloaded than those from revolution were, therefore more confident in its season 2 prospects. However, I don't think there will be that much of a raw numbers difference.

All of this is for sure speculation on my part, it could go completely on a different direction!

I think that whenever there's some decision that seems like a disaster to all the regular punters, it must be related to finances or something. Financially it must've made more sense to keep Neighbors over MC, because ratings wise it seemed like at best a totally neutral move, with a way bigger downside.

Yeah I think you're right and that is usually my thinking mode. Like I say that the mindy project should have never been renewed and I say that glee should have never gotten a 2 years renewal, but I get it that revenues are probably higher than we know due to the high concentration of 18-34. I say that How to Live should have been renewed but I understand that it was probably too costly with the actors it had and the fact that it wasn't even an in-the-house production. But with TN vs. MC, I can't find anything like that. Cost wise it's very unlikely that there was a significant difference because MC was a multicam, so it was cheaper to make by definition. Fair enough, they had Reba on MC, but I even canceled it out. For the record, I watched MC and I watched a bit more than half of a season of TN. I like them both; not spectacularly, but okay enough, so I am not biased here I think. My problem is that I can't find any evidence that this was more than a preference call.

Yeah, keeping TN over MC seems like a pretty iffy move. Maybe they were unhappy with the ratings of MC, and wanted to roll the dice and see if TN could do any better - as in, they pretty much knew the roof of MC, but TN could've, in theory, done better. It's the nature of us as Monday morning quarterbacks: the only moves we actually see play out are the ones that the networks make, so we can rail on the networks for making bad moves when we'll never know if something else could've done better. Yeah, TN is struggling, but maybe MC would've fared just as poorly this year. The Neighbors is posting ~80% retention of LMS, which was about what MC was doing anyway.

Either way, I doubt we'll be seeing a full fledged return to TGIF next year.

That appears to be the case, yeah. But it seems such a stretch to me that they couldn't figure out that TN' downside potential was so much higher than MC. Besides, I disagree with the notion that MC had a roof. It needed retooling to be a bit more male focused and fit better with the rest of the friday lineup, but that could have easily been solved. It's a mute point right now, and I agree with you that we only see the moves that networks actually make, but yeah, it's still frustrating. For instance, even if the 4th comedy hour for CBS is a major bust and they hurt POI in the process, etc etc, there were tones of upside potential, so I could understand the motivation - the risk is there, but the upside potential is there too. Here? The risk is there... the upside potential, not so much.

Spot did point out that even accounting for the Friday factor TN was Truly a couple of ticks stronger than MC at the end of last season. However, as he also pointed out in Best Case/Worst Case, the LMS pairing was no way to demonstrate that!

As you say, the comedy expansion of CBS had enough potential that POI was worth messing with. I wouldn't have done it the same way they did, but one of my different ways (singlecams leading out of the Chuck Lorre power hour, keep the returning multis untouched with Mom at 8:30) still involved moving PoI. (The other option I'd considered was putting the singlecams on an island on Wednesday with Survivor to Sunday and one of the Sunday dramas cancelled. Coming out of the Survivor premiere, with no syndie deal for TGW, that basically looked like a slam-dunk to me. Then Survivor spiked, TGW got the syndie deal, Mentalist got an early renewal, and that move stopped making sense.)

When you've got some of the pieces ABC have - a still-growing drama that's already the top 10pm show on TV, two big comedies (one a megahit) in their first year of syndication, the biggest new show of the season, the biggest Friday-only show in the A18-49+ era (DWTS and DoND were both multi-night franchises) - you shouldn't be a distant fourth. That's why ABC are everyone's favourite network for Monday morning QBing of the schedule!

I think CBS Friday did way better than expected, especially after adjustments. Happy for H50 even though I kind of feel bad this year if I feel happy for H50 because that means bad things for The Good Wife, as I am convinced the two of them are fighting with one another. I think TGW will loose the battle though, so if CBS gets rid of two shows (in addition to Hostages, of course), my guess is The Mentalist and The Good Wife.